ABSTRACT
The author, a friend of Karl Popper as well as of John Hicks, offers insights into the genesis of The Open Society with which he was associated in its first three years’ of writing. In 1937, Popper, a 35-year old Austraian School teacher, took up an appointment as lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College in New Zealand, which I joined in 1939. He spent eight years there during which he wrote two major books, The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies. Both were written under severe difficulties in regard to time, resources and teaching conditions. The Poverty began as a considerable revision and extension of an address given to Hayek’s seminar at the London School of Economics, and The Open Society began as marginal notes on the history of historicism. But it developed into a much larger book which Popper regarded as his war work, constituting a strong condemnation of all forms of totalitarianism and giving strong justifications for tolerant and open minded democracy. The difficulties in writing these great works were followed by difficulties in finding publishers for them. But eventually Hayek had The Poverty published as three articles in Economica, and helped in getting Routledge to publish the two-volume Open Society. He was so impressed by both works that put Popper’s name forward for a vacant Readership in Logic and Scientific Method at the LSE, an appointment which Popper took up in 1945. When he arrived there, Popper soon found that he had been lifted from relative obscurity in a small university, remote from Europe, to considerable fame in a leading intellectual centre, a fame which increased with further important publications and numerous honorific awards.
